Animations
Sunday Driver, Adobe After Effects, 0:40
Sep 2023
Sunday Driver was my first 2D animated short film. Every visual element was created in Adobe Illustrator utilizing its powerful vector tools to ensure crisp, clean lines and vibrant colors. The animation process was transitioned into Adobe After Effects where the static illustrations were brought to life through the puppet tool and other effects found in the program. 2D animated works allow greater freedom in how an artist chooses to convey emotions through bizarre and subtle facial expressions that do not work the same way as they do in a 3D short film.
The most difficult part of this animation was figuring out how to loop the trees and road markers when they went off frame and how to loop them fast enough to signify speed. I made the stretch of trees into twice its length off frame and then duplicated it so that when one copy exited right of the frame it would go back to the left within four frames. Also made the tires into ovals to make it more obvious that the tires were spinning.
In this scene I used the warp effects found in After Effects on the wheel to further sell the idea that the car is going at a high acceleration. Rather than a looping trick for the trees I rendered them into their own separate .MOV files since it made them much easier to move around.
For the final scene I took a picture of myself holding a prop gun and then traced it over in Illustrator. I did not want to make the background busy with a lot of car interior objects so I defaulted to just plane purple colors.